A video encoder compresses video information so that more information can be sent over a given bandwidth. The compressed signal may then be transmitted to a receiver having a decoder that decodes or decompresses the signal prior to display.
High Efficient Video Coding (HEVC) is a video compression standard, which is being developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) formed by ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG). Similar to previous video coding standards, HEVC includes basic functional modules such as intra/inter prediction, transform, quantization, in-loop filtering, and entropy coding. HEVC codec processes and compresses a picture by partitioning it into multiple non-overlapped blocks, which are denoted as coding units (CUs). A coding unit contains a square block of luma pixels and two corresponding blocks of chroma pixels. The size of the coding unit can be configured to be 8×8, 16×16, 32×32 or 64×64 in luma component.
Based on the HEVC standard, the study of Three Dimensional Video Coding extension of HEVC (3D-HEVC) is currently on-going by the Joint Collaborative Team on 3D Video Coding (JCT-3V) formed by ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG). In 3D-HEVC, Multiview Video plus Depth (MVD) concept is used to represent the 3D video content, in which a limited number of texture views and associated depth maps are coded and multiplexed into a bitstream.